Athens

Contours

Geography and History

Athens is defined by the mountains and sea that surround it, and by the tectonic movement and erosion that carved this jumble of low hills in the centre of the Attica Plain. Its central geological feature, the Acropolis or higher city (from the Greek akron, which can mean higher, top or extremity, and polis, city) is, like the hills that surround it, part of a nappe or kippe of limestone, an outcrop of rock formed by tectonic movement, here weathered over the sixty to one hundred million years since the rock formed in the Late Cretaceous period. A nappe, specifically, is a geological feature that has been shunted some way from its original position by tectonic forces. The Acropolis rock actually started out near Mount Hymettus, fifteen miles east of its current position, and is creeping very slowly westwards. In another sixty to one hundred million years, it will be a pretty islet somewhere off Piraeus or Cape Sounion, although by then the tectonic subduction that is causing mainland Greece to sink into the sea may have tugged Athens beneath the waves.

It is these hills that give parts of central Athens, such as modernday Kolonaki, the appearance of a Mediterranean San Francisco - or, indeed, the steeper parts of Glasgow. In the case of the Acropolis, its modern shape is also due to more recent human engineering, particularly infills of local sandstone and Athens schist, in preparation for the building projects of the Golden Age, which we might date to Pericles’ rule between 461 and 429 BCE. Some of this prehistoric landfill, scuffed to a shine by millions of visitors’ shoes over the centuries, is over forty feet deep: perhaps a necessary measure to support the fantastic feats of engineering that lofted the huge columns and pediments of the Parthenon temple some 512 feet above sea level and into the sky. While barely half a mountain, on a clear day it offers views as far as the island of Poros, 35 miles away as the crow flies. So prominent is it from the sea that the city’s early navies used to take a sighting on the light glinting off a statue of the goddess Athena on the Acropolis as they navigated their way home.

For most of the eight thousand years that humans have used the Acropolis hill, the Acropolis was Athens, and on at least one occasion it was abandoned entirely, only to be re-inhabited later. The earliest archaeological finds around the Acropolis complex have dated its oldest structure, remnants of a large temple dedicated to Athena Polias, protector of the city, to the sixth century BCE. It is likely that the area would have been settled as far back as the Greek Neolithic period before the sixth millennium BCE - the Acropolis rock is pocked with very troglodyte-friendly caves - but as successive occupiers have pointed out through its history, the entire Attica Plain is a very poor choice for either settlement or farmland, with a heavy clay soil and scant natural water. Yet Athens has endured, through periods of glory and abandonment and occupation by most of the armies on the move through the Mediterranean throughout those millennia, largely due to accidents of geopolitics and the excellent protected moorage at its ancient natural harbours of Faleron and, later, nearby Piraeus.

Athens is a landlocked city but one with the sea in its bones - and in its ears. We might also say it has the sea in its heart, and its soul. While it lacks a Hudson, Rhine, Seine or Thames (its two main rivers, the Kifissos and the Ilissos, were lost beneath two centuries of urban construction until recent decades, and it took the building of the new Syntagma station on the Metro system to unearth the dry bed of what was once the Eridanos river), one of its oldest streets, Pireos, promises to get you to the sea just five miles away in as straight a line as possible. (In fact, Pireos follows the route of the ancient Long Walls that once defended the vital link between Athens and its seaport.)

The city, and the country it has represented since 1834, were both founded on sea trade and sea politics thousands of years ago. We can trace these ties to a sea narrative that became a cornerstone of world literature, Homer’s Odyssey, in addition to the journeys that took Greeks to and from the Trojan Wars in his Iliad. Greece has long had a particularly intimate relationship with its surrounding seas: its nearly 82,000 square miles of landmass are edged with a convoluted 10,000 miles of coastline - 4,600 of them f ringing all those lovely islands. Its interactions with the rest of the Mediterranean, either in peaceable trade or its f requent excursions into aggressive military expansionism, have usually been conducted by sea, as have most movements of trade, population and the communications of a nation reaching out across an archipelago of 247 inhabited islands (of a casual roundup of maybe 6000 largely uninhabited ones).

The sea recurs in the country’s mythology, folkways and culture, from Homer’s wine-dark variety up to Nobel laureate George Seferis’ haikus, and even the poetry of cultish poète maudit Kostas Karyotakis, who tried to drown himself in it. The sea is everywhere you go, literally and metaphorically: in the novels of Nikos Kazantzakis and Alexandros Papadiamantis; in the paintings of the great Greek sea painter Constantinos Volanakis and the works of the Greek Impressionists of the nineteenth century; from the music of Manos Hadjidakis and Mikis Theodorakis, through the great rebetiko performers to some unlikely corners of post-punk, such as the watery masterpiece Sixteen Haiku by the Athens group Sigmatropic (more of which later) and in the films of anyone from Jules Dassin to Theo Angelopoulos, who rarely finishes a movie without taking his camera to the seaside. It even turned up in the opening and closing celebrations of the 2004 Olympics, in the symbolism of renegade dramatist Dimitris Papaioannou and his figure of a little boy aboard a giant paper boat drifting across the temporary sea which Papaioannou installed in the Olympic Stadium. And nowhere is the Greek relationship with the sea more poignant than in the Homeric notion of nostos, homecoming, particularly at the start of the great festival of the Greek calendar, Pasca, Easter, when Athens goes home to the islands, and the islands go home to Athens.

Perhaps the most surprising fact about the history of Athens is its persistent dwarfism: its contours remained more or less static for the best part of those eight thousand years, and only began to change drastically in the mid-nineteenth century. While each city was shaped by very different circumstances, it is interesting to compare it to London and, particularly, Paris, the city on which the nineteenth-century New Athens modelled itself. To take at random the year 1820, the eve of the War of Independence that was to usher in the modern Greek state, is to find Athens resembling a small rural village with an unusually large archaeological relic attached. In 1820 London already stretched to encompass Kensington in the west and Wapping in the east, with a population of 1.25 million. Paris already had around 700,000 inhabitants filling the twelve central arrondissements in the city centre. Yet Athens at the time resembled what one visitor called a miserable shanty town, comprising the Acropolis and perhaps two hundred buildings used by the occupying Ottoman Turkish garrison and its dependents, with a total population in one estimate of barely four thousand souls. A famous painting from a few years later, Peter von Hess’ The Entry of King Otho of Greece in Athens (1835), shows a crowd surrounding the new king (on the steps of the Thiseion temple and nothing between it and the Acropolis but open countryside.

This was, admittedly, at one of the f requent low points in the ever-changing population levels of Athens, which at its classical and Roman peaks topped 100,000 inhabitants in the city and its satellite settlements. By 1900 New Athens had a population of around 125,000, although this was already overflowing a newly-built city originally designed for a projected occupancy of, at most, forty thousand inhabitants. A century later, it bypassed the three million mark, as the city described by historian Michael Llewellyn Smith as a Los Angeles of the Mediterranean finally spilled onto its own littoral and started climbing the foothills of the mountains that ring the Attica Plain.

Stranger still, while it may have spent a great deal of its history languishing as a backwater of the Ottoman Empire, Athens was already a metropolis with a magnificent past before people were even starting to build huts in what would become the great cities of Europe. So much so, in fact, that many historians talk of Athens as a city already consumed by a nostalgia for its past as it entered the fourth century BCE. Paradoxically, Athens would have to wait until the 1830s for that nostalgic passion to be sated, in an orgy of what the modern city’s most eloquent historian, Eleni Bastéa, has called archaeolatry, worship of the past (although as some Greek intellectuals have bitterly noted, it was an orgy hosted by German occupiers - or what the Athens media of the time sourly dubbed the Bavarocracy).

While Cádiz lays claim to the title of oldest continuously-inhabited city in Europe, in the Mediterranean Basin only Damascus and Jericho have revealed the remnants of settlements older than those in Athens (and all three are Chalcolithic, or, Bronze Age). Official chronologies date Chania, on Crete, Larnaca, on Cyprus and Thebes, modern-day Thiva (north-west of Athens) as older than post-classical Athens, but none has had the longevity of this pocketsized City upon a Hill. Thebes had an important role as a major rival to Athens and Sparta in the region’s early history, while Larnaca (the Phoenicians’ Kition) remained on the margins of the Greek narrative. Chania, far older than the Cretan capital Heraklion (founded in the seventh century CE), has important links to Crete’s history in Mycenaean and Minoan cultures, although Arthur Evans’ theories about Minoan culture on Crete took a dusting in Cathy Gere’s robust dismantling of the Minoan myth in her book Knossos and the Prophets of Modernism.

Founding Myths

Across time spans as lengthy as these, even Greece itself becomes a nebulous concept: an exonym, a word used by outsiders but never, originally, by those it named, its etymology is usually agreed to have derived either from the people of an ancient town, Graea, in Euboea (modern Evvia), which either traded with or sent migrants to what we now call Italy, where the new arrivals were blessed with the adjectival Graikos, or possibly from the name of an ancient ruler of the region. Homer called the tribes of Thessaly Hellenes, a word possibly deriving from regional myth, and Aristotle is believed to have been the first writer to use the words Greece or Greek. The region’s earliest inhabitants, proto-Indo-European nomads from Asia Minor, have been lumped under the generic name of Pelasgian, while later groups have to be identified by their individual social and tribal names, such as the Achaeans, Aeolians, Dorians and Ionians. Confusingly, the last of these nowadays lend their name to the islands and people of the Greek archipelago between the foot of Italy and western Greece, but originally they were Greek-speaking inhabitants of what is now Turkey, named after the mythic hero, Ion, who was invented, according to historian Robin Waterfield, to be a founding-father of all the Ionic-speaking communities in Asia Minor. The Ionians settled most of the Greek mainland, including that archipelago south of the Adriatic, and became synonymous with the Athenians. What would nowadays be called identity politics for these early Greeks is a philologist’s conundrum, based variously on era, locality or political affiliation, and one usually accompanied by legions of prefixes and suffixes, but at least this promiscuous border-hopping in early Europe belies any latter day claims to nationalist purity.

No such confusions of nomenclature attend Athens itself: Athina in Greek, Athenai in classical Greek (a plural denoting both place and the later city-state). Its name comes from its protecting deity Athena, in all her competing guises, and whose worship has been dated back to Crete in the fourth century BCE by sources from Plato to Robert Graves. Famously, she sprang from the forehead of Zeus fully-formed and clad in armour, and later competed with Poseidon to become protector of the then-nameless city. She would also, of course, disrupt Poseidon’s plans to wreak revenge on the upstart Odysseus at every dramatic turn in The Odyssey, and aided Jason in his pursuit of Medusa.

Differing but complementary versions of the myth named her Athena Polias, Pallas Athena, Athena Parthenos and Athena Nike. She was also worshipped under other, lesser epithets in Athens and elsewhere, and was later equated with the Roman goddess, Minerva. As Athena Polias (of the city), she was charged with protecting the metropolis that took her name. In the guise of Pallas Athena she was the goddess of civilization, warfare, wisdom and other qualities. Athena Parthenos (virgin, from the manner of her birth and hence the term for asexual reproduction, parthenogenesis, in addition to the name of her temple, the Parthenon) was inspired by the virginal qualities of the goddess, although the 38-foot statue of her, the one those sailors used to navigate by, was replete with the symbolism of war, not least the figure of Nike, goddess of victory, standing in her hand, and it was in this form that she was deified in her own temple on the Acropolis. The Athena Parthenos statue, a marvel of chryselephantine (gold and ivory), was clad with two thousand pounds of gold (some believe her temple was actually a treasury for the ancient city), which was later melted down to fund the city’s military. The statue vanished in mysterious circumstances some time after the fifth century CE, although various replicas remain, including, bizarrely, a modern one in a full-scale simulacrum of the Parthenon in Nashville, Tennessee.

Little is known about Athens prior to the intense programme of building inaugurated by Pericles in the fifth century BCE. Along with Pylos, Thebes and Tyrins, it was one of the major cities in the Mycenaean culture that occupied the central Peloponnese in the years 1600 to 1100 BCE, the twilight of the region’s Bronze Age. Nothing remains of Mycenaean Athens apart from the massive foundational Cyclopean walls of a Mycenaean fortress on the Acropolis. Various theories have been proposed to explain the end of Mycenaean Greece, from disasters to warfare with neighbours - notably the Dorians, one of the four main tribes of classical Greece, who occupied Crete, the Peloponnese and other regions. Robin Waterfield argues a subtler thesis that the Dorians infiltrated Mycenaean Greece and Athens, and that Mycenaean culture subsided beneath waves of internecine warfare, a recurrent trope in Greek history up to the present day.

In the Dark Age that followed the fall of Mycenaean Athens, the city’s contours if anything contracted, as large numbers of people either left or fled the city, to other settlements in Attica, other regions and even out to the islands. The next, and most dramatic, stage of the city’s development was under Pericles, for reasons personal and political that we will explore later. Developments on the Acropolis had continued after the Dark Age, notably under Peisistratus and Themistocles. The latter reconstructed earlier walls demolished during the Persian destruction of the city in 480 BCE, and built a surrounding wall that determined the size of the city of Athens for centuries to come (Waterfield). This irregularly-shaped fortification, with the Acropolis rock at its centre, was barely one and a half miles square and would today be bounded by Syntagma Square and Pireos, Dionysiou Areopagitou, Arditou, and Stadiou Streets.

Pericles went further. As well as instigating the construction of the Parthenon, he also ordered the outlandish Long Walls to be built between Athens and Piraeus, to defend the city’s connections to its seaport (although they too would later be destroyed). Nothing remains of the Long Walls, except in conjectured sketches of their route, although some foundations from this era remain, rather abandoned, in the backstreets of Piraeus (near the end of Syntagmos Pezikou). This project, at first augmenting an earlier wall built by Themistocles to defend the route to Faleron harbour, which Pericles abandoned to concentrate on the superior moorage at Piraeus, now provided a fortified corridor running the five miles between the walled city and its port. The Long Walls survived until the end of the Peloponnesian War (431 to 404 BCE), although they also provided a perfect conduit for the plague that killed a third of the population in 430 BCE (Pericles included) as the besieged and enclosed city proved an ideal breeding ground for the disease. The population of Athens at the time is estimated to have been around 100,000, and the devastation of the plague, followed by the defeat of Athens by the Spartans and the Peloponnesian League, was to pave the way for the rule of Philip II of Macedon, his son Alexander the Great and, finally, Rome.

The map of Athens remained more or less static during successive centuries, until the city was sacked by the Roman general Sulla in 85 BCE, when many public and private buildings were destroyed - although others, such as schools, were retained. The peak ofroman Athens came in the second century CE, with the crowning of the noted philhellene Hadrian as emperor in 117. As he had done elsewhere, in Britain and Spain, Hadrian embarked on building projects to glorify himself and his empire, including his Library, still visible in the Monastiraki district today, and the suburb of Hadrianopolis, in the area now covered by the National and Zappeion Gardens. In return, the Athenians built the monumental sixty-foot Arch of Hadrian, also still visible if somewhat marooned on Lisikratous Street, with its famous inscriptions of This is Athens, the former city of Theseus, on one face, and This is the city of Hadrian, and not of Theseus on the other. He also names one of the main thoroughfares of the modern Athenian tourist zone, Adrianou Street, which leads to the Library and the lovely neighbouring Tower of the Winds, another Roman treasure, although precisely who commissioned it remains a mystery. Other Roman benefactors (it is worth noting that the Romans were largely welcomed by the Athenians) also expanded the outline of the city, including Herodus Atticus, who built the vast amphitheatre in the shadow of the Acropolis and completed the Panathenaic Stadium, out beyond Hadrianopolis on the edge of the tiny modern-day suburb of Pagrati. This would provide the ground plan for the first modern Olympic